Be Thou Awesome

Web Design and Front End Development

Be Thou Awesome is a creative web design studio I co-founded. It's still a little something I do on the side, especially for larger projects that involve branding, copywriting and user research among other things.

A web design studio wouldn't be what it claims to be without...a website. So, that's what I built.

Design Concept

Having the word awesome in the title of a company already gives you something tio live up to. Our goal was to define a style for the brand that differentiated it from other designers in the area. After a number of concepts and ideas, we landed on a direction that really pulls from the team’s natural strengths, which is custom and hand-drawn illustrations. We were able to pull this off while balancing it with smart, witty writing that makes visitors smile while taking the company serious at the same time.

Front End Development

My challenge was to build the website so it was lean and loads quickly in browsers, but to showcase all of the create artwork that went into creating the design. The layout is very image heavy, so anything I could do to optimize the site in a way that helped it load faster was going to be a huge plus.

For example, it would take a mobile device on a slow internet connection a long time to download some of the huge images on the site. I made mobile-optimized version of the same images and set them to conditionally load just for those devices, saving mobile visitors precious seconds (and expensive data plans).

The Be Thou Awesome website is plugged right into WordPress, so it’s easy to update content. I took advantage of features like custom post types so we could create a simple portfolio that organizes posts in several helpful ways, like type of work and clients.